What new regulations are coming down the pike and how will they affect environmental services companies? To find out, Springfield Business Journal Editor Eric Olson sat down with Chris Jungbluth, owner of Professional Services Co.; Lee Schaefer, CEO of Sunbelt Environmental Services Inc.; and Jason Smith, president of Environmental Works Inc.
Eric Olson: If you could describe environmental services in one word, what would it be?
Lee Schaefer: I would say dynamic.
Chris Jungbluth: Busy.
Jason Smith: Challenging.
Olson: What about the industry is dynamic? Does it have to do with the government’s role?
Schaefer: That’s part of it. When I said dynamic, it’s always changing. It doesn’t rely so much on the change in administration, but it takes time when these regulations are put forth. It can take years before they get implemented down to our level. Then we have to put them into place, and that requires training. We were just at a conference this week regarding underground storage tanks. Twenty years ago, we used to dig and haul for underground storage tanks. Now, I don’t know how to explain it, but you study it.
Smith: You study the site to see what stuff we can leave behind. It’s more of a risk-based assessment after the tanks are removed to ensure the right cleanup is done and passed. We used to take all the contaminated soil out of the ground and take it to a waste site and we all realized that’s just an expensive way to deal with that problem. It became more of a risk-based approach, “Do we need to clean this waste up?” But that required more studying. It’s a lot more scientific process.
Schaefer: We look at groundwater, “Is it contaminated? Is there vapor intrusion into buildings?” Whereas 20 years ago, it really wasn’t a question that got asked.
Olson: Environmental services aren’t typically in the forefront. What would you like people to know about what you do?
Smith: We kind of have four different divisions. One of them is compliance, complying with regulations. That’s focused more on local industry, manufacturing. Stuff like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. Those acts have thousands of rules associated with them that have come down over the years and because of that, the industry has to comply with specific permits they have to obtain. We have remediation services. Those are longer-term projects and are more invisible to the lay person. You see activities out in the field. We have field services, industrial maintenance and response. A lot of these service lines Lee offers as well. These are visible to people and are related with our remediation service and our compliance service. A lot of times our compliance component leads to things that had to be done at facilities in the field to help them comply, cleaning out a process tank or something like that. Our fourth component is environmental due diligence, doing property assessments, usually for property transactions. Whenever due diligence is really busy, we know there’s a lot of activity going on in the community.
Schaefer: Take underground storage tanks for instance. Not only do you have the client involved, you have the (Missouri Department of Natural Resources), the PSTIF – and we’ll throw buzzwords out – Petroleum Storage Tank Insurance Fund, and you have us. Sometimes the (Environmental Protection Agency), too. So it’s not just us and the client, people don’t realize that. We are the last person someone wants to see or work with because we aren’t usually bringing good news.
Olson: The news you bring has a cost to it.
Smith: It’s hard sometimes. Sometimes it is a direct detriment to their business, so that’s a cost that’s harder to stomach.
Schaefer: It’s not all about the environment and the cleanup, which is important, but there is possibly this person who took all of their life savings. The one I remember is Joe Gamble. He owned a little Texaco, but it’s a Subway now. That cleanup was dig and haul and that man spent $100,000. That was his life savings, but he had been operating there for 50 years and he knew it was the right thing to do.
Olson: What role does the insurance fund play?
Schaefer: To keep that from happening. For roughly $100 per tank, per year, they can get a $1 million insurance policy to cover leaks, cleanups, etc. That’s a big deal.
Smith: It’s a state funded program. They have to pay the $100 per tank, but the money that goes into it is from taxes on gasoline at the pump.
Olson: So, the fund is for fuel stations?
Smith: It’s a very cheap insurance policy.
Schaefer: Yeah, it’s actually funded by the transportation side of it, but for however much is hauled, so much goes into the fund. I think their ceiling is $70 million.
Smith (to Olson): I notice you’ve got the document from the [Solid State Circuits Inc.] Republic site. That’s been going on since the early 1980s when they found chlorinated salt in the city well. That was a situation where the manufacturer had a well in their basement, and over time solvents got dumped down into that well and the drinking water got contaminated for Republic.
Schaefer: Is it done now?
Smith: No, we’ve been working on it. It’s been going on since the early 1980s. We’ve been working for 10 years as the lead contractor. We’ve done some innovative things like what Lee was talking about out there in the past few years. For 20 years we operated a groundwater pump and clean system. That was the technology in the ’80s and ’90s. You’d pump water out and clean it up, but you’d never really treat the problem. So, a few years ago we started working the EPA and MDNR to find a different solution, and we’ve done chemical oxidation type treatment. We basically went in and treated the source of the contamination in-ground with an oxidant that breaks down the solvent and then last year we worked under Main Street and started injecting a biological treatment, bacteria that broke the contaminant into a benign chemical. And we’ve seen great results from that. This is a site where millions of dollars were spent pumping and treating groundwater, basically pumping it to the wastewater treatment plant with no reduction in contamination levels for the past 15 years. Now, we’ve taken it from contaminated levels to almost no contamination levels in key areas.
Jungbluth: One of the things he’s talking about is that sometimes you don’t get reduction, but you prevent the plume from growing so it doesn’t infect more wells.
Smith: The Springfield-Greene County area is very susceptible to groundwater contamination. There’s regulations here on how you have to construct wells, especially in this area, because the upper bedrock is very susceptible to sinkholes, caves and things that just make it easy for contamination to go a long way. In this case in Republic, there was a feature that allowed this contamination to go much farther than it normally would have.
Jungbluth: We’re talking about chlorine materials that have the propensity to go down when it rains. They’re going to sink to a lower level, so it’s harder to clean them up. It’s public record that we have a TCE contamination out at Rogersville.
Olson: There are 38 known superfund contamination sites in Missouri, four in our area, and Picher, Okla., is a big example for when superfunds go bad.
Smith: Times Beach is the example we have in Missouri of superfunds. Some of those were the reason superfunds were created.
Olson: What happened in Times Beach?
Jungbluth: A gentleman had a business where he was trying to control the dust, but he also was getting rid of some oil for people. However, it was contaminated with dioxin. It had dusty roads, so it contaminated the whole town and had to be evacuated.
Schaefer: This gentleman’s name was Russ Liss, and he was a contractor, like you explained. He picked up his oils from a company that the waste was actually the byproduct of Agent Orange. He picked up the byproduct thinking, not knowing, it was toxic and used it, spraying it just like motor oil on dirt roads, horse arenas, actually there were 27 locations. The reason I know so much is that it was basically the birth of my company. One company came in and set up what was called “The Blue Goose.” It was a mobile incinerator. They called and said, “Can you supply 25 people at five different sites to do management and waste cleanup?” Of course, I said yes and that went on and that was our business for 15 years. We ended up applying 45 people from all around Springfield and it was weird jobs. We ended up cutting 300 tons of metal into 6-by-6 pieces and sprayed sodium hydroxide to get the dioxin off. The guys had to shower in and shower out. My vice president at the time had a credit card payment in and he says, “You spent $300 on underwear. What is this about?” I said, “Well, the EPA says they can’t wear their underwear home, so we had to provide them new underwear.” So their job was to find out if they wanted boxers or briefs.
Olson: What are some recent projects you guys have been working on?
Schaefer: I can’t name particular companies because sometimes we sign confidentiality agreements, especially with large corporations who end up doing cleanups. I think it prevents information from getting to the public. Once it comes out, we know some of the ones around here, but typically it involves large corporations who’ve been in Springfield for a long time who have now left the scene and left some waste behind. There are several projects that are going on in Springfield that aren’t being covered by the media, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Olson: Is asbestos still a real problem?
Schaefer: It is, and the reason is at the time they came out with those regulations, a lot of asbestos was found in elementary schools, high schools, and if the EPA had mandated they take it all out, it would have bankrupted the schools and we wouldn’t have schools. So, they came up with a management program where they could take it out a little bit at a time. Every summer we take out asbestos and there is so much that we could never take it all out. And two, asbestos is only banned, per se, for manufacturing in the United States.
Olson: How often are you guys in hazmat suits?
Schaefer: Well, I don’t think it’s as prevalent as it was five years ago. A lot of fire departments and police departments are now covering a lot of the cleanup since a lot of the problem in this area is methamphetamine. We may be called in to clean up some of the chemical waste, but the way it worked out was a lot of the time there was some criminal activity involved with it.
Olson: Are there any regulations that don’t make sense to you?
group laughter
Schaefer: Oh, we’ve got one or two.
Olson: Maybe it’s a double-edged sword since you depend on those regulations to survive.
Smith: We do, absolutely. We’ve got to keep our clients happy. So, when regulations don’t make sense, it’s our job to put on the lawyer hat sometimes. We’re not lobbyists really, but the government can be bad about this. They identify your problem and they try to craft a solution to it through a regulation. When they do that, there are so many things about that operationally that they don’t understand in the process. So they create bigger problems. DNR has been really good about reaching out to the regulated industry and getting feedback on what makes sense and what doesn’t. I sit on the advisory committee for the board of trustees for the insurance fund, so this has been an ongoing topic for a long time. What really works well is the regulator who is making the rules reaching out to the industry for help, saying, “How can we word this so that it will work for you guys?” It is has been kind of enlightening to watch that process.
Schaefer: You know, Jason really brought up a good point: Springfield is a very, very unique community because of our aquifers, our springs, our lakes. Unbeknownst to many in Springfield, our upper aquifer, named the Springfield Aquifer, that the pioneers used to drink from is completely contaminated. You can’t drill a well into it because it is contaminated.
Smith: Septic tanks.
Schaefer: Right, and we’re trying to keep the Ozark Aquifer.
Smith: Other communities, like Republic, Nixa, Ozark, they rely on that aquifer.
Schaefer: We lose that one, and it’s not good news.
Interview excerpts by Features Editor Emily Letterman,
eletterman@sbj.net, and editorial assistant Barrett Young.
